Re: [Usability] Our approach to GUI design

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 18:23 +0000, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> This makes me wonder: is some of our work on usability
> the wrong way round? We leave the developer with the
> HIG and they do their best, and then we come along and
> spot all the mistakes.
> Programmers don't draw their own icons, they get an
> artist to do it -- should we expect programmers to
> design their own GUIs?

We should consider providing higher-level tools -- e.g.
dialogue widgets with buttons already in place, although
this particular example already exists -- and consider
bribing the glade developers to make sure they are supported.
Glade could also include pre-built application fragments
as templates, which might help.

This is similar to the question about "..." in menu entries --
if a menu directly brings up a dialogue, the toolkit could put
the dots there.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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